No Life But This (4 page)

She wanted to know why I was showing her this.

Even the passing thought communicated itself to me. And of course the answer instantly sprang to mind – the mind I could not keep hidden from her here and
now, no matter how much I might want to.

I loved her.

Of course, there were so many levels of love in that thought. The word itself is just a word, but for me, I was able to communicate the sympathy and similarity I felt with her, as we were both outcasts in a world that couldn’t begin to understand us. Then the compassion I felt when I thought about how much pain she had gone through in her
long/short life. The simply companionable friendship we shared, the way we wrote to each other in the evenings, how I could tell her things I could never tell anyone, ever. How wonderful it was that, my telepathy aside, she did not turn in disgust or horror at my blue skin or my strange, expressionless face. And there, through it all, a strong, purely physical current, her body, her eyes, the gold
flow of her hair, poetry in human form; how much I longed to simply touch her – touch her anywhere, her wrist, the back of her neck, the tips of her fingers, any part of her that was
her
.

I was overwhelmed myself by the sensation of her absorbing this simple fact. The extent of my devotion hadn’t really communicated itself to her before. This was how Nabiki had fallen in love with me – one instant
of feeling how I saw her. It wasn’t really fair to Rose.

I was instantly sorry, but Rose didn’t want me to be sorry. Because she knew how it felt, to love someone, really love them for themselves. Suddenly I was inundated by what I’d never wanted to see; the pervasive, all encompassing relationship she had had sixty years ago with Xavier. The true understanding that had happened between them,
the need, the desperation, the fear, and love above everything else.

But once she had thought of that the pain of losing him flashed through her mind too – how it felt to have had him ripped from her life, her life twisted until he was so far beyond her reach that even living in the same house he would barely touch her. I was torn open by the simple roar of
It’s not fair!
It was a feeling she
lived with every day. She was very used to it, she wasn’t even dwelling on it – it was just a passing thought – but I was blasted by it. And the blast knocked me backwards until I nearly sank. My head ached with the pain.

‘I’m sorry!’ Rose swam for me and took hold of my arms, leading me to the side of the pool, trying very hard not to think about Xavier.

‘My fault
,’ I tried to tell her.
‘I
knew … I knew about that.’
I tried not to think about 42. Rose knew about that, too, but there was no call to inundate her with my grief, or the memory of her death. I wondered if sharing our pain was really the best thing for either of us. I was about to suggest we call this off, but Rose touched my shoulder, drawing me to her in an embrace.

That threw 42 out of my head, sure enough. Rose’s
flesh was warm and soft beneath the water, and I could feel her bare skin against mine. My fingers gripped her, and I tried again to lock down my mind. I didn’t want to think about what her touching me was doing to me, physically. I tried to think about what it meant to her.

I was disappointed. There was no physical rush, no sensual delight in touching my blue skin. It wasn’t that she was repulsed
by me, or didn’t find me reasonably attractive, artistically. It was that every nuance of her physical desire had been locked behind an impenetrable wall when she’d discovered that her Xavier was alive, but in his seventies, and untouchable. He was off limits, so I was off limits and Bren was off limits and every other man and woman in the universe was sexually off limits until she could sort
it all out.

But she did want to touch me. I let myself be content with that.

We were both beginning to get used to sharing mindspace. She grinned. ‘Is that what you call it?’

I shrugged. It was as good a term as any. She was beginning to understand why words meant so much and so little to me. I had no words I could say, but words don’t mean the same thing as thoughts. It was why I wrote poetry
– or tried to. I saw words as a medium, like Rose saw her paintings. A tool, but not the thing itself. Because I could see the thing itself, and not only in my own mind.

She smiled at me as I took hold of the wall. ‘This is strange.’

I’d known what she was going to say. I grinned at her. What about me wasn’t strange? She chuckled. ‘Does your head hurt?’ she asked suddenly. ‘That is you, isn’t
it?’

Now that she reminded me of it, my head did ache. I barely noticed anymore. I knew it would pass. I was pretty used to headaches, and I’d been under a lot of stress. I was sorry she was feeling it. She could get out if she wanted.

‘No.’ She didn’t want to get out. This was a miracle to her, a gift, a strange journey. She wanted to know what all the colours were that she was feeling.

‘Oh,
hell
.’ The colours. She had to have seen the colours, the depth that I’d been trying so hard not to think about, so as not to shock her. But there it went. She brought it up, and there it went. My last lock.
‘It’s you,’
I thought.
‘It’s all you
.’ And all the wild, tangled briars of her mind were completely visible to her, not hidden behind my veil of secrecy. Rose. Rose, as she was inside, a sea
of vivid colour, the vast ocean of her subconscious. Rose stared at me, utterly stunned as the beauty of her mind became open to her, gorgeous mindscapes of colour.

She could see them, and they amazed her, and she carried me along. Suddenly she was amplified by her awareness, a mirror reflected upon itself, spinning off into infinity. I was overwhelmed. Completely. Suddenly there was nothing
left of me but her. My own consciousness disappeared, buried under the avalanche of colour.

Then, without warning, my body melted into droplets of pain. The colours surged, a tsunami of subconscious time, and I was drowning under it.

The last thing I heard/felt before I was submerged in a hopeless agonizing vortex of everything at once was Rose screaming in sudden terror.

What I felt and saw
and heard won’t make much sense to anyone. Rose was so overwhelmed by being caught in the shock wave that she couldn’t describe it any better than I could. When you ask Quin, all he does is look tragic and make jokes. The best way to describe what happened is to write out what was recorded on the security cameras. We start with a very pretty image of myself and Rose in the Unicorn pool, both of
us a little overawed by each other. Then a look crosses my face, something between pain and amazement. Suddenly, my body jerks, convulsively. I am caught in a sudden seizure. Blood begins to leak out of my nose and ears. I lose hold of the side of the pool. At first, Rose holds me, or tries to, but the moment she sees the blood she starts screaming. The crimson of my blood streaks her pretty white
skin, matching her red swimsuit. She can’t shake the seizure of my mind, and she’s lucky she doesn’t sink and drown. She isn’t able to hold me any longer, and she isn’t able to make it out of the pool. It is only her proximity to the wall that saves her, particularly as she’s still so thin she doesn’t float.

I, on the other hand, am seizing so violently I have lost all control. I sink beneath
the blue water of the pool, blood clouding around my face. There are a tense thirty seconds while Rose is jerking, trying to close down her mind, and I am utterly helpless, sinking to the bottom.

Then, like some holovid superhero, a figure comes sauntering along the other side of the wrought-iron fence; blue skin, black hair, tall, arrogant. Quin listens to the sounds which come from the pool,
which have degenerated from a scream to a thin, anxious whine, as Rose can’t even maintain a scream any longer. He takes one look at the two of us in the pool, Rose in agony, me drowning in a cloud of my own blood. ‘Holy coit!’ Quin shouts, and without even stripping off his shirt, vaults himself over the fence and dives into the pool.

I, of course, am in the throes of a major biological crisis.
My mind is going haywire, sending out waves of confused torment. Between my telepathy and Rose’s overpowering subconscious, which was also caught by my telepathy, Quin’s mind was likely reduced to marshmallows the moment he touched the water. Quin, however, reacts like a berserker under pressure. Roaring like a beast, his face twisted in agony, he drags my still convulsing body into the shallow
end of the pool, and hoists me over the wall. My chin is banged against the tile and blood is still flowing from my face.

The moment I’m out of the water, Rose recovers. She holds on to the wall trembling in horror for a few more seconds until she realizes she’s free of me.

Quin will deny it until the day he dies, but you can see it clearly on the vid. He is sobbing as he jumps out of the pool,
and his face is purple with pain. He shouts at Rose to get a towel. Rose hurries to grab one, and rushes over to me to wrap me up. Quin swears at her. ‘For coit’s sake, don’t
touch
him!’ He pushes her roughly aside and wraps me tightly. He shouts at Rose to fetch Tristan and the others as he pounds the water out of my lungs. It’s clear that I’m breathing, but I’m still jerking like I’m being shocked.

Rose is crying too. She stumbles as she runs to the wrought-iron gate. The screaming and the shouts have already drawn Bren and Tristan from the billiard room. Bren pulls his cell from around his neck and shouts for his grandfather.

Xavier comes down within seconds, and Penny comes with him. Penny starts to hyperventilate the moment she sees me, and Tristan has to comfort her. She takes Penny
to the side where they converse in hurried, desperate sign. There are a few tense moments as Rose tries to explain what happened to me, but she’s too shaken, and she’s crying too hard. Bren finally goes up to her and wraps her in his arms. She sobs against him. I know Rose rather well, and when I watch this vid I know half of her sobs are because Xavier wasn’t the one to come and hold her. Xavier
is instead standing in the middle of all the chaos, efficiently trying to keep order. I think he’s the one who celled the EMTs, but he might have been celling the lab. I never asked. Either he or Bren celled the EMTs in.

I spend all this time on the ground still jerking like a marionette in the hands of a demented puppeteer. Quin is just angry, and shouts at everyone. He stands over me like a
guard dog, angrily barking at everyone who gets near me. He even threatens to hit Penny when she comes up to see how I am, holding his hand up in a powerful fist, and Tristan signs at him angrily. Finally, the seizures cease. Quin does a quick check to make sure I am breathing, which I am. But I do not wake up. Rose starts crying again, probably in relief, and Quin sinks onto his haunches, trembling.
Tristan looks exhausted, her blue skin almost grey. She sinks onto the ground. Penny clambers over to her and climbs into her lap. They stay curled together, watching me, until the EMTs arrive.

When they do finally arrive, Quin is not helpful. He won’t let them touch me for a full three minutes. He thinks my mind can’t take it. Finally he allows it when they explain they’ll be wearing gloves
and won’t touch my skin. Xavier goes with me as they carry me away, to be sure they take me to the UniCorp lab, rather than the regular hospital; no one else can handle my physiology.

Quin sits down on one of the deck chairs after I’m gone and stays there, trembling. Bren finally drags Rose inside, and Penny and Tristan sign to Quin that they’re going to the lab to be there when I wake up.

For the next hour and a half my brother sits utterly still on the deck chair as the UniCorp servitors clear up the disastrous party behind him. I’ve never seen his dark, sardonic face look more empty. He almost looked dead.

I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. Even after three years at UniPrep, there was no way I could forget. There’s nothing like the sound of the lab – the beeps of the monitors, the steady hum of the air conditioning, the professional office sound of the people in the corridors. When I opened my eyes my theory was confirmed. I’d been brought back to the lab, set into my familiar
hospital bed, and a dozen different machines were monitoring every pulse, every breath, the firing of every synapse. I sat up and ripped the brain monitor off my scalp.

The machine started complaining at that, but I was finished having my every thought monitored by UniCorp. I’d escaped that three years ago, I was not going back now! Besides, it hurt – the same way the tape of a bandage starts
to hurt your skin – a quiet, persistent annoyance, like a mosquito in my skull.

The disgruntled beeping of the monitor brought in Dr Svarog, my personal physician. Each of us had our own private doctor, all part of a team, but Dr Svarog headed that team. Our physicians were secondary under the geneticists and biologists who still ran the project. I rather liked Dr Svarog. He’d been hired when
I was nine, and had monitored our growth ever since. Because he had come so late to the Project I couldn’t fault him with anything. He was making do with the materials that had been handed him.

‘Awake, I see,’ Dr Svarog said. ‘Feeling okay?’

Now that he asked me, I realized I felt wretched. My head throbbed, nausea lurked in the pit of my stomach, and my body ached all over. I signed something
to that effect, but Dr Svarog wasn’t particularly good at sign. He came up to me and held out his hand, asking my permission to touch me. I always liked that about him. I took hold of his hand and let him know
exactly
how I was feeling.

He reeled. ‘Whoo!’ he breathed. ‘Not so great, then.’ Dr Svarog’s mind was always clinical, but there was a warmth behind it that made it okay. I was, to him,
a person, and not just a collection of body parts and symptoms. Not every doctor was like that. He turned his attention to his notescreen and made a few ticks on my chart. ‘Do you want to risk a painkiller for your head?’

Usually I was adamant about this. I got headaches so often, and the typical over-the-counter stuff did practically nothing. But if I kept myself on the heavier painkillers I
was consistently useless and stupid, and likely to get addicted. The last thing my biology needed was an addiction, so usually I just endured my headaches and tried to ignore them. Today, I considered. My head hurt
a lot.
‘Something mild,’
I signed.

‘We’ll hope it works,’ Dr Svarog said. ‘I’ll try and find something that will work as a muscle relaxant, too. I think you strained a few things.’

‘What happened?’
I signed.

‘We’re not entirely sure, yet,’ Dr Svarog said. He leafed over some auxiliary pages on his notescreen. ‘It is clear you had a blood pressure spike, and that resulted in a seizure, but we aren’t entirely sure what caused it.’

My head throbbed.
‘Yes we are.’

Dr Svarog frowned at me. ‘Don’t leap to grim conclusions,’ he said severely. ‘There’s no indicator that this is
the same thing that happened to your siblings four years ago.’

‘No? It sure feels like it.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

I clapped my hands, ‘
Hey!’
Once I had his attention I added, ‘
I should know.’
Touching my head for the sign for ‘know’ made my headache spike. I winced, which didn’t help, either. Suddenly my nausea surged. ‘
Sick!’
I signed desperately. Dr Svarog rushed to push a kidney
bowl under my chin. Very little came up, and most of that liquid. I wondered how long I’d been unconscious.

Unfortunately, my retching made my headache that much worse, and I groaned – my whispery, dolphinish groan. I usually had more control over myself than that.

‘I’ll get you that painkiller,’ Dr Svarog said gently. ‘Don’t work yourself up, Otto. There were all kinds of possibly mitigating
circumstances which could have caused an unforeseen reaction in your biology. Unfamiliar food, harmonic resonances from the close proximity to music, various chemicals in the water of the pool. Not to mention your close contact with Miss Fitzroy.’

Oh, god, Rose!
‘How is she?’

‘There seem to have been no lasting effects on Miss Fitzroy, though Mr Zellwegger did bring her here for a full evaluation.’

‘Can I see her?
’

‘She’s not here at the moment. Maybe when you’re feeling a little better. Quin and your sisters would like to see you, but I think you’d do best to let your painkillers kick in a little. Shall I tell them forty minutes?’

I shook my fist in the sign for ‘
Yes,
’ and closed my eyes as Dr Svarog injected me with something. I felt better within five minutes, but then I was drowsy.
I drifted in and out of awareness, only half sensible of Dr Svarog recalibrating my monitors, or of 42 lurking in the corners of my consciousness.

I was asleep when Dr Svarog showed in Tristan and Penny. I opened my eyes to the sound of Penny bursting into tears. Tristan signed at her angrily to be quiet. Penny could only shake her head. I waved a greeting to them and Penny sobbed louder. Quin
burst in behind them. ‘Quit it!’ he snapped at her, and slapped her arm. Penny cried out. Tristan clapped her hands at him angrily.

I covered my ears with my hands.

That made all three of them go instantly silent, though Penny still sniffed quietly.
‘I’m sorry,’
Penny signed.

‘I told her she couldn’t come in unless she behaved herself,’ Quin said, his voice still burred with annoyance.

The
last thing I wanted to do was listen to Quin’s ire at this point. I reached out for Penny, who grasped my hand fiercely. Her mind was such a roar of terror that I snatched my hand out of her grip, even though the movement made my head ache worse.

Tristan touched Penny’s shoulder, probably saying something to her silently. Penny closed her eyes in the calming technique she’d been trying to develop
since she turned fifteen. It was a little mantra she’d recite in her head, and she didn’t open her eyes until she was finished. When she opened them she looked more in control. I reached out again, and found she had buried her terror behind the surface thoughts. I can read nothing but surface thoughts unless I concentrate, and I almost never try. It’s against my personal code of ethics. There’s
a big part of me that feels a person’s mind is their own, and I shouldn’t meddle. It took some tough lessons to make me learn that.

‘
Otto, are you going to be okay?
’ Penny asked me.

‘What does Dr Svarog say?
’ I asked her.

‘
He says he doesn’t know.’

‘I don’t know any more than he does.’

Another tear snuck out of Penny’s eye, and she sniffed and pulled away. Tristan took my hand then.
‘Hey,
86,’
she said. ‘
You’re not going to 86 on us, are you?
’

My eyes crinkled in our tiny version of a smile, but I didn’t have an answer for her. Penny added her hand to Tristan’s, and the two of them sent me fervent Get Well wishes. Penny had made me a card, but she’d forgotten it in her room and – I stopped her and told her to give it to me tomorrow.

Quin did not touch me. He stood brooding at
the foot of my bed. Finally he looked at the girls and jerked his head towards the door. Penny and Tristan let go of me and looked worried. ‘I’m not going to eat him!’ Quin snapped. ‘Now get!’

They left, Tristan biting her lip and looking meaningfully at the camera in the corner. You couldn’t even see the minuscule thing, but we all knew it was there. ‘Oh, give me a break,’ Quin said to her retreating
back. ‘You think I’d drag him out of that pool just to beat him up?’

The set of Tristan’s shoulders led one to believe she did not think such a thing impossible. I didn’t either, really. I knew Quin of old. But I didn’t think he was angry at me just now.

I was wrong. ‘She’s right, though,’ Quin snapped the moment the door was closed, his fist closed. ‘If you weren’t sick, I’d hit you. What the
coit did you think you were doing!’ I closed my eyes and sighed. I really had nothing to say.

‘Swimming. Swimming in an unknown pool, with Rosalinda Fitzroy? Have you a death wish, or something?’

‘No,’
I signed.
‘Rather a life wish.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘
I’m not going to live in fear!’

‘If you persist in this infatuation, you’re not going to live at all!’

I shook my aching head and
looked out of the window. It was getting on towards evening. The light was fading to blue outside, and the birds had hushed. Finally, Quin came closer to the head of the bed, standing between me and the window. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Was it like last time?’

‘Ask Tristan,’
I signed.

‘She doesn’t know. She can’t receive, remember? She was just helping Una and the others. Besides, that was
after the fact. You’re the only one who knows what it feels like
before
the end.’

I looked away from him. I could hear 42 laughing in my head.

‘Otto!’ Quin snapped. ‘Answer me!’

I heard something in his tone. He was shaking. I could have assumed it was with anger, but Quin’s anger tends to be cool, if explosive.
‘You scared?’
I signed.

Quin clenched his fists, but all he did was breathe heavily
through his nose. ‘This has to stop,’ Quin said. ‘I’ve been watching you moon yourself sick over that stuck-up princess for months! It’s not as if they’d ever let you do anything with her. She’ll probably marry Bren Sabah or Hank Guillory or the CEO of MonaCo in the most expensive corporate merger in history. You are an alien freak, or have you forgotten? You’re a propertyless publicity nightmare.
Do you think Mr Zellwegger or UniCorp’s board would
ever
let you keep her? You’d be assassinated before they let that happen. Or maybe just declare you inhuman and strip
all
of us of our rights.’ Quin was always afraid they were going to do that. ‘Out of all of us, I never thought you’d grow up to be the ladies’ man. Nabiki was next to impossible as it was, but Rose? It can only end in blood.’

Trying hard to keep my temper I signed, once again,
‘She’s just a friend.’

‘Oh, burn it, like I believe that.’

I clenched my jaw.

Quin wasn’t finished. ‘Then, suddenly you get into a pool with her – water, Otto! You get into the water with a hundred-year-old freak of science where you can’t get away! – and of course you go into meltdown!’

‘Rose didn’t do this.’

‘Oh, no? You didn’t see the
brain scans they did on her after you were dragged in here bleeding like a slaughtered pig. Do you know her brain is abnormal?’

I looked away.

‘They can’t even identify how!’ Quin cried. ‘Something to do with the stasis, they think, but they’re not sure what it is, since her mental faculties seem, and I quote, Unaffected. But they aren’t, are they. This is you, I know you. This is something
you had to know. Is this what’s been making you go all calf-eyed over that skinny bitch?’

‘Watch it
,’ I signed.

‘No,’ Quin said. ‘What are you going to do, bleed on me? Vomit on me? You’re lying there half dead because of some anorexic bleach blonde with a broken brain, and I’m not about to sit here and let that happen!’

‘You insult Rose again and I will break you!’
I signed. ‘
You want to know
how this feels? All I have to do is get my hands on you. You want last spring’s broken arm? You want Nabiki’s breakup? Do you really want to know how I feel for Rose? Do you? How about all of them at once?’

‘I’m trying to save the life of my stupid brother!’ Quin snapped. ‘Who can’t keep himself safe from some broken-brained bitch. I don’t care how you feel about her, she’s dangerous! And if
you won’t listen, I’ll bet she would.’

‘You dare!’

‘I would.’

‘Rose didn’t cause this, okay?’

‘How do you know? Even Dr Svarog thinks it might have been contact with that UniCorp whore.’

‘
Call her that again!’
I signed, sitting upright in the bed, headache or no.
‘Just try it! I dare you!’

‘How do you
know
!’ Quin challenged me again.

‘Because I’ve been ignoring this for weeks!’

Nausea
struck me again and I had to lie back down. I leaned over the side of the bed and dry heaved, but there was nothing left in my stomach. I couldn’t even see, my head ached so violently. Finally, I just hung there, too dizzy to pull myself back into the bed.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my back. Very gently, Quin lifted me upright and set me back on the bed. There was a slight hesitation as he propped
me up that was uncharacte‌ristically warm. If I didn’t know Quin better, I would have thought he was giving me a hug. But he would deny any such impulse if you asked him. He walked away from the bed and paced slowly at the far side of the room as I recovered. One hand was against his forehead as if trying to squeeze emotion out of his brain. ‘How many weeks?’ he asked quietly when my breathing
had stabilized.

‘Eight, maybe ten,
’ I signed.
‘Since before normal school let out.’

Quin’s face twisted. ‘And you didn’t tell us?’

I pinched my fingers lightly together.
‘No.’

‘Otto,’ he sighed. Then he looked at me closely. ‘What is it? Just the headaches?’

‘Night sweats. Bad dreams. Dizzy spells.’
I hesitated, and then figured, what the hell. I was telling him everything else.
‘Disorientation.
I’ve had moments where I thought I was somewhere else, or went looking for Una or 42 before I remembered they were gone.’
I didn’t mention that I kept hearing 42’s voice. I wasn’t sure that had anything to do with this.

‘Coit,’ Quin breathed, and he sank heavily into a chair. He seemed to be having a hard time catching his breath. ‘What are you … what do we do?’